no game is going to bring back the era of being with your friends in a same physical space to spend hours gaming without a care in the world. the young don’t even have that now.

I've spent thousands on gaming and home theater equipment to realize I don't love TV/movies/gaming, I loved hanging out with my friends.

Can still have it. I have semi regular Mario Kart and Smash Bros nights. Loads of fun, always stay up until way too late. Finish off with a dumb movie.

You're only chasing that high because you don't embrace whimsy

Ours was people bringing over their desktops to one person's house and we played Aliens vs predator on a LAN. When we were done we played risk for the rest of the night.

Was much fun.

We should have a fucking Fediverse game night somewhere.

I feel like there is a whole generation of millennials who has this feeling about MMOs - always chasing the high they felt playing WoW back in 2004, always on the lookout for the next up-and-coming MMO thinking this surely will be the one, never realising that they're longing for a moment in time that can never be recaptured, a version of themselves and a place in their life they'll never re-experience.

Uhm, not Halo.

The peak moments were Friday nights with the gang; pizza ordered; Goldeneye, pyramid level, slaps only, no Oddjob; an ongoing Lego collaboration being worked on for the ones who there weren't enough controllers for in that round (you'd cycle out that spot); and first-gen Super Smash Brothers waiting on the side.

This is an entire genre of videos

I stopped chasing it and now I just get baked every weekend after the kids go to bed then sit and cry in my beanbag chair while eating oreos out of a cup of milk with a spoon

this is also the title of my isekai manga.

For me it was Unreal Tournament. Have been playing several different fps games in the last day or so, and none of them scratch the itch I have, though UT itself (via OldUnreal) comes the closest.

I don't think the game I want exists, because I want features that exist in multiple separate games.

Nobody plays RTCW anymore..

Ha. I worked at a place in thr 90s where lunch time was Engineering office Quake party.

AoE 1 lan party.

Battlefield Vietnam

StarCraft Brood war

Supreme commander

Unreal Tournament Edition

Counterstrike 1.6 (I think) These were my 2001 lan party gaming experiences I wish I could reclaim.

You can play all of the Master Chief collection in VR now. It's fantastic!

I had a couple lan parties a while ago. That shit is so fun. Soldat was really popular.

Last year i had my cousins kids over for a tiny lan with them, me and my sis. We played UT99 for ages and they loved it.

Oh counter strike

For me it was Quake II on the Nintendo 64. Didn't even have a LAN, just a big-ass TV split into quads. It was a skill to watch your own screen but also everybody else's so you knew where they were in the arena. My buddies always went for the BFG which was effective of course but pretty crude. I secretly spent months playing the single-player campaign and practicing like crazy with the rail gun, which could also take people out with one shot but was very difficult to get a hit with. I got so accurate with it that my buddies accused me of cheating somehow -- the ultimate compliment.

And this was around 2003 - 2004, almost a decade after the N64's heyday. You just don't need the latest shit to have fun. Give me a stick and a hoop and I'll be happy.

Gone forever....

For me it was Mario Kart Wii...

Honestly its not too hard to get an xbox emulator running, and you can find a match fairly quickly. I think the main community night is Thursday, but you can find a game most nights.

Split screen Goldeneye my antediluvian friends.

I was all about GoldenEye back in the day for me.

Afterwards, CounterStrike and StarCraft:BW was the cause of many nights lack of sleep.

Pretty much me, except it was Halo 2 and probably 2006. We schlepped a heavy ass tube TV over from someone else's house a few blocks away.

Peak for me was modded Minecraft around… what. 1.7.10?

I found this whitelist Resonant Rise server that was just the right size; big, but not too populated. I made a community workshop close to spawn to help people start out.

Haven’t found that experience since, in any game.

My back still hurts from the hauling CRT!